Living On (Happily) Ever After:
Derrida, Philosophy and the Comic

Robert S. Gall

Originally published in Philosophy Today 38 (1994):167-180

They were offered the choice between becoming kings or the couriers of kings. The way
children would, they all wanted to be couriers. Therefore there are only couriers who
hurry about the world, shouting to each other -- since there are no kings -- messages
that have become meaningless. They would like to put an end to this miserable life of
theirs but they dare not because of their oaths of service.Franz Kafka(1)

In reading the texts of Derrida, one easily notes how they repeatedly exhibit the
frivolous and joking character of writing (AF 125-127; D 93)(2)
through puns, double entendres, and turns of phrase that, like jokes, are often
untranslatable. Taking a closer look, we also recognize occasional allusions to the
conventions and strategies of comedy in these texts. For example, Derrida's call for a
kind of thinking at the end of philosophy that is affirmed "in a certain laughter and a
certain step of the dance" (MP 27; cf. WD 136) recalls the feast and reconciliation
typical of the end of comedy. One also cannot help but notice how Derrida, either as
commentator (AT 30; EO 141; Ltd 82) or signatory (WD 300: "Reb Derrisa," a homonym of "Reb
de risée", the "rabbi of the laugh" or the "laughing rabbi"), frequently reminds us
of the comic implications of his texts. Add to that their playful and performative
nature (which suggests a comparison with literary- dramatic forms) and their labyrinth
of forms and styles that is reminiscent of comic texts, and it is no wonder that there
are frequent references to the genres of comedy and the comic in characterizing the
texts of Derrida.(3)

However, despite the frequent references to a comic quality in the texts of Derrida,
little has been done to show what this means for understanding those texts. That is,
commentators (including Derrida) use the trope "comedy" and the "comic" to
suggest/promote an understanding of philosophy and a comportment toward the world that
is "comic" in some larger sense, but they tend to leave that comic quality unexplored.
It is, however, just this comic quality, and the larger sense of "comedy" that it
implies, that I wish to explore in an effort to distinguish the texts of Derrida. Noting
this comic quality and the comic strategies employed by Derrida will, I suggest, prove
helpful for suggesting how we might better understand the texts of Derrida, their
relationship to the philosophical tradition and such traditional concerns as ethics,
politics, and religious thought.

* * *

It is difficult to find unanimity on the subject of comedy and the comic. As one
critic has put it, not only comedy but its criticism is a labyrinth. Yet a labyrinth is
an order as well as a tangle,(4)and we can take note of a
number of features and strategies that are important, if not absolutely necessary, for
characterizing the comic, and which are echoed in the texts of Derrida.

(1) The Arbitrary and Discontinuous. A variety of critics have noted that a
common feature of comedy and the comic is an emphasis on discontinuity and the
arbitrary.(5) On the one hand, this means that comedy
usually represents the dominant society or practices of its play as operating according
to arbitrary laws. The dominant order is a matter of chance, not necessity. For
instance, Aristophanes attempts to show his countrymen in Lysistrata that war
between Athens and Sparta is not necessary; another order (i.e., peace between Athens
and Sparta) is not only possible but beneficial. So too Molière, in The School for
Husbands, by contrasting the way in which two brothers treat their wards (and
intended brides), shows that the traditionally 'proper' way to raise a faithful wife is
not the only way and can in fact (does, in fact, in the play) fail. Figaro, in the 5th
act of Beaumarchais' play, challenges his master by pointing out that his master's
position is only an accident of birth. On the other hand, this emphasis means that the
accidental and the discontinuous tend to dominate the comic rhythm. As far back as
Aristotle, it was noted that plot was not very important for comedy. Comedy tends toward
the episodic -- witness the comic strip, or Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. There
is sometimes a jumping back and forth in time, as in Billy Pilgrim's "progress" through
Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5. Chance encounters are the rule, rather than
the exception. Magic and fantasy are not uncommon, as is the case when a magician
enables a humanities professor at CCNY to become a character in Madame Bovary
in Woody Allen's short story "The Kugelmass Affair."(6)
Even the magic is chancy; Puck's magic is less than certain in Midsummer Night's
Dream, and Kugelmass accidentally ends up trapped in a remedial Spanish textbook,
chased ever after by the verb tener ("to have").

Of course, Derrida takes the arbitrariness of the sign acknowledged and repressed by
Saussure as one of the starting points for his deconstructive enterprise of/from
grammatology (OG 44ff; cf. MP 10f, AF 110-112). Since "the thing itself" is a sign, and
what is represented is always already a representatum (OG 49, 50), the presumed
necessity of any system of signs -- which assumes the priority of one sign as
signified and others as properly or improperly signifying that signified -- is
subverted. Since what is signified always already implies a sign that points to it, what
is signified is itself a sign, a trace, the trace of a presence (an absolute origin)
that never was there. By showing the interconnectedness and con-textual nature of
sign/signified and all other metaphysical binary oppositions, deconstructive discourse,
like comedy, shows that the presumably absolute, categorical authority of a law (BL
190ff; cf. Par 249-287) assumes an authority it does not have.

But then, like comedy, Derrida also shows this arbitrariness by enacting it. His
texts often take their point of departure from accidental or incidental features,
correlations or correspondences in language and texts. A footnote in Sein und Zeit
(MP 31ff), an incidental piece by Kant (AT), an isolated comment by Nietzsche (SNS
123ff) become starting points for his analyses. The "mute irony" of substituting an "a"
for an "e" creates the nonconcept différance (MP 3ff); the unheard accent
grave changes a feminine pronoun into a place in Cinders. Seemingly incongruous
commentaries are laid side by side in Glas and "Survivre" (Par 119-178). The
writing is telegraphic, as postcard dispatches punctuate The Postcard, and
aphorisms (even the less than aphoristic) leave their mark on Roland Barthes and
architecture, and mark time in Romeo and Juliet (Ps 273-304, 509-518, 519-533).
Seemingly odd associations are made, and concepts transformed: différance
becomes the trace becomes hérisson (a hedgehog, also reminding us of
hérisser, "to spike"; CCP), or fire and ashes (C; OS). The texts of Derrida are
like the harlequin's costume -- patchwork and piecemeal -- showing us the pretense of
our presentations to the world.

(2) Repetition and Reproduction. The arbitrariness of laws leads to the
arbitrariness of ends in comedies and in Derrida. On the one hand, this means that since
the established order has no point or purpose, repetition overdone or not going anywhere
belongs to comedy (Frye 168; et. al.). Comedy reveals that the dominant society is
caught in obsessive, repetitive behavior that accomplishes nothing. Abbott and
Costello's comic routine "Who's on First[?]", in which each participant asks the
'proper' questions and gives the 'proper' answers about the players on the new baseball
team, over and over, to no avail, is a classic example of this point. "The Roadrunner"
cartoons, where the predator (Wile E. Coyote) quite 'properly' pursues the roadrunner,
over and over, even attempting, like a proper American coyote, to employ modern
technology in his quest, would be another example. On the other hand, since there is no
point, the end, i.e., the finish, of comedies likewise often enact this arbitrariness;
they interrupt something that will go on ever after (happily or not). The Taming of
the Shrew, at first glance, seems to end, happily, but Kate's submission is suspect
(and is usually played so that we are not convinced she has submitted); we have the
sneaking suspicion that the agon of this marriage (and all marriages) will go
on indefinitely. Molière, much to the chagrin of drama critics, is often blatantly
arbitrary, ending Tartuffe with the miraculous intervention of the king, for
example, or rather incredibly tying together all sorts of loose ends in The Miser.
And exactly how could you end the "Who's on First[?]" routine, or "The Roadrunner"
cartoons, except arbitrarily?

It is much the same with deconstructive discourse. Derrida sees philosophical
discourse ruled by a desire, an obsession, namely, a desire and obsession for "meaning",
i.e., "wanting to say" (vouloir dire) something -- a full and unspoiled
presence, a foundational and/or constant arche or telos. Yet this
desire is infinitely deferred and comes to nothing. Why? There could be no meaning, no
communication, without the absence of what is meant, and without the iterability of
words and meanings. Hence all presentations (of meaning) are always already (possible)
re-presentations. The purity of the origin or end is disrupted "from the start";
mimesis, imitation, 'rules' something like philosophy. But a mime (e.g., a
philosopher) does not do anything (D 216), does not accomplish anything. Hence
philosophy -- which thinks that it is going somewhere, from somewhere, i.e., that it has
an absolute telos and/or arche -- is ultimately unable to justify its
beginning or end (e.g., AF 108-109, 118-119; D 182n, 271). Meaning -- the burning desire
and obsession of philosophy -- entails a wandering from sign to sign, trace to
trace, deferring infinitely the presence it desires.(7)

The desire and obsession in comedy that is reproductive rather than
productive often turns, not surprisingly, on sex. Old comedy such as survives in the
work of Aristophanes included wearing huge artificial phalluses and telling obscene
jokes. Ever since, from high comedies of manners to the low comedy of farce, whether it
is women getting the better of men, youth overcoming obstacles to their desire, or the
cuckold winning his horns, comedy has usually had something to do with sex. It is not
hard to see why. Being perhaps the lowest common denominator among human beings, sex is
a natural focus for a genre concerned with the common interests of mankind. Thus sex can
serve as a great equalizer and leveller, an ideal focus for showing that the rich, the
powerful, the unique, are really no different, no better, than anyone else. Likewise, if
you wish, as comedy does, to show the impotence of the old order, there seems
no better way to do that than by reference to sex.

Derrida and deconstruction have had recourse to much the same strategy, noting the
"phallo-centrism" of "logocentrism" (= "phallogocentrism"; see, e.g., D 48-49 & n.47; Gl
113a, 188a; PSF 477ff) and the (intellectual) "masturbation" of trying to erect a
philosophical system (OG 141-164). Deconstructive reading therefore involves castration
-- "always at stake" (D 302) -- that cuts into the columns of text that are the erection
of philosophy to note the gaps, the fissures, the openings (as in a woman) -- i.e., the
radical alterity ("woman") -- on which philosophy depends, and which it therefore does
not control. Deconstruction takes note of the feminine phantom haunting the smoke (and
mirrors) of philosophy (C 33) and thereby seeks to think as a woman, "woman being one
name for the untruth of truth" (SNS 51; cf. Gl 126a, 126bi, 187a; PSF 442ff). To think
as a woman would not be to erect a philosophy but to be fertile in another way
-- by playing, affirming an endless substitution that is neither signified nor
signifier, presentation nor representation, showing nor hiding (P 86-87).

(3) The Ironic. The arbitrariness, discontinuity, and mimicry in comedy make
meaning and self a tricky matter. Comedy usually deals in characters (a Falstaff, a
Groucho Marx, Chaplin's Tramp) that fit any number of situations and therefore come
across as representative figures, general "types" rather than "individuals." As
representative figures, they do not evolve or change. But in order to maintain
themselves in a hostile world, we find that comic characters need to show wide variances
in their appearance and their language. Their persona become fluid and multiply; puns,
double meanings, and the disguises of language proliferate. Thus Euripides, in
Aristophanes' The Poet and the Women, appears in various parts from his plays
(Menelaus, Perseus, Echo) in an attempt to save his once-disguised father-in-law
Mnesilochus. Groucho Marx plays with language to say the unspeakable, i.e., to attack an
enemy, or make lecherous advances toward a woman, all the while remaining Groucho. Woody
Allen's Zelig is a "human chameleon" so as to fit in the world around him. The
incongruity between character and mask, word and meaning, is ironic, and evokes
laughter. In addition, as the designation of Zelig indicates, this duplicity often goes
to the point of breaking the bounds of humanity, mixing (with) the divine, the bestial,
or the mechanical. Many of Aristophanes' plays, with their bestial titles (The Birds,
The Wasps, The Frogs), point to this breakdown between man and beast,
as do stock comic figures like the cuckold (who grows horns), the shrew (as in The
Taming of the Shrew), or the often inhuman babel of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.
Likewise, the mechanization of comic characters by reducing them to the physical -- with
emphasis on their predictable desires for food, shelter, and sex, or their routine
bodily functions -- emphasize these breakdowns. Humanity is shown to be but one more
mask. Indeed, everything is turned into mask and revealed as mask in comedy; everything
reduces to pure surface and inessential appearance.

This masking in comedy is the truth of deconstruction, a truth that will not be
pinned down by truth, a truth that is no truth because it plays at dissimulation,
ornamentation, deceit, and artifice (SNS 55, 59, 67, 69; cf. WD 263). Here the self is a
trace, i.e., "the erasure of selfhood, of one's own presence" (WD 230; SP 66, 85),
disrupting the proximity of self-presence necessary for self-identity and identification
by "the proper word and the unique name" (MP 27; cf. OG 107ff). The self always exceeds
the récit (story) it tells (itself) (Par 272-273), because it is not what it is
unless it adds to itself the possibility of being repeated (of being a re-citation).
As a result, the self withdraws in the supplement (e.g., its name) that presents it (D
168). Such is the "anonymity" of the trace in which the possibility of being repeated
makes one's "own", "proper" name (e.g., one's signature) available to anyone (D 143-144;
Ltd 29ff). The "democracy" of writing (D 144) that comes at the end of history, whereby
the individual is 'lost' in the Dionysiac mirror-play of language, thereby marks the end
of man and humanity (MP 111-136; cf. the inhumanity of the name, Ps 528). Thus Derrida
too, like comedy, breaks the bounds of humanity, writing in a language that is
monstrous, bringing forth monsters from the tradition (DO 123): Francis
Ponge/sponge, or Hegel/eagle, or the death that haunts one's name, the Geist of
humans reduced to fire and ashes.

(4) U-topia. Much of what has been said so far in characterizing the comic
comes into focus with regard to what we may call the comic u-topia -- what
others have called the argument or the discussion, reminding us of the links between
philosophy and comedy since the (anti-tragic) dialogues of Plato.(8)
Comedy aspires to, or culminates in, or takes its perspective from, a u-topia,
literally, a "non-place" free of the constraints of the everyday world, detached from
the old or dominant order and outside of time, a ludicrous context marked by the lack of
(conventional) rationality, morality, and/or work in which the comic character is not
threatened. Such a u-topia takes many forms. It might be the traditional,
festive end of comedy, that "bliss beyond time" in which everyone lives happily
ever after, or simply the carnivalesque atmosphere of a pilgrimage such as we
find in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. It might be a safe haven in the midst of
the world -- the parlor (where women rule) in domestic comedies, the forests of
Shakespeare's romantic comedies, the Boar's Head Tavern where Falstaff presides, the
hospital ward where Yossarian finds refuge in Catch-22. It might simply be a
different, detached perspective on things that is neither inside nor outside the comedy.
A comedy of shifting perspectives like Thackeray's Vanity Fair that recognizes
the universal folly of human being would be one such example; the ironic discussions
that take place between author and reader in such works as Cervantes' Don Quixote
or Fielding's Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews would be other examples.
Whatever form it takes, the detached perspective of the comic u-topia
thoroughly informs the play, for what is at stake is the conservation and survival of
the comic, whatever his or her point.(9)

Correspondingly, Derrida has characterized the task of deconstruction in terms of a
search for the non-place, the non-lieu, the non-site or u-topos from
which to interrogate philosophy (DO 108, 112) (or any other dominant order).
Deconstruction tends to what is neither inside nor outside, what does not 'take place' (n'a
pas lieu), is not an 'event,' or is an event (événement) whose advent (avènement)
is to come (à-venir). On the one hand, this involves constant reference to what
are called "undecidables" or "quasi-transcendentals." Undecidables (non-concepts such as
pharmakon, supplement, gram, etc.) are unities of simulacrum that
inhabit but are not included in a system, resisting and disorganizing it instead (P 43;
cf. 101n13). Undecidables might be described as u-topias of language, holes in the
fabric of the text, punctures that punctuate the text and give it its texture (cf. Ps
274, 278-280). These "non-places" then are not resources and reserves of meaning, but
mark a mise en abyme/abîme, an abysmal staging and setting of meaning, a
simultaneous creation and ruination of meaning. On the other hand, what is
'accomplished' by Derridean deconstruction is not some new system but "undecidability"
(D 93, 127, 219ff; S 64). In other words, it seeks in its writing to inhabit and enact a
u-topia, a "non-place" of alterity and otherness that marks the end of history,
the closure of the history of meaning and being.(10)

The way in which this u-topia shows itself and is inhabited, however, is crucial to
understanding the debates surrounding the texts of Derrida. We might make this
clarification by taking a closer look at comedy, and to a distinction made by Charles
Baudelaire between the significative comic (le comique significatif) and the
absolute comic (le comique absolu).(11)The
significative comic includes comedy that has some sense of utility about it; for
instance, it serves as a moral critique and corrective to whatever dominant society,
order or practice is depicted. Its critique favors those (either a character in the play
and/or the audience) who, in one way or another, inhabit the dominant society depicted
in the play but are nonetheless marginal and left out by that society. To do this, it
focuses on those interests common to all men (civic and private concerns such as making
money, getting a mate, etc.) and, with regard to these interests, applies a standard
that is perceived to be the social norm and mean (or should be the norm and mean).(12)
In Aristophanes' satiric comedies, for example, the famous (Socrates in The Clouds,
Euripides in The Frogs) or the powerful (government officials or armies in
The Knights and The Acharnians) are shown to be ridiculous and thus the
cause for the troubles of the heroes (Demos ["the people"] in The Knights,
Dikeopolis ["honest citizen"] in The Acharnians). In comedies of manners,
gentlemen and ladies of high and sophisticated society (and who thereby presumably sets
standards for society) -- because of their foolishness and/or violations of social norms
(that they have established) -- are shown to be really no different or better than
anyone else. So the drama critic hero of Arsenic and Old Lace learns
that he is a bastard and, indeed, exults in the fact, for it allows him to get the girl.
In romantic comedies (such as are common with Shakespeare), the true lovers are
prevented for a time from coming together by an often patriarchal figure and/or society
that reveals itself as old-fashioned, stuffy, conventional -- but their love survives
these threats. What is accomplished in all this, as Frye notes (169), is a movement
"from a society controlled by habit, ritual bondage, arbitrary law and the old
characters to a society controlled by youth and pragmatic freedom." In the 'end,'
everyone gets together and is brought together. In its classic form, comedy 'ends' in a
feast or banquet, often attendant upon a marriage, from which even those characters who
served as obstacles to the comic hero's desire are not excluded. Taking its cue from its
utopian perspective, significative comedy administers the quintessential pharmakon
-- the laughter of comic relief -- which is both deadly to the old order or perspective,
and therapeutic in providing a new, inclusive perspective on things.

Is the utopian perspective of the texts of Derrida to be understood along the lines
of a significative comedy, with its celebration of conversation and community? Is there
some ethical/political point to its practice? Some have thought so.(13)Such
a view has its source not only in his apparently political "attacks" against racism and
nuclear proliferation (Ps 353-362, 363-386, 453-475) or in the apocalyptic tone of some
of his early essays, but also in the apparently subversive nature of the texts of
Derrida. For instance, Derrida's deconstructive strategy, like that of comedy, places a
great deal of emphasis on the marginal. Indeed, Derrida is almost obsessed with margins,
evidenced not only by his investigations of titles, frames, signatures, and footnotes,
but also by his continual writing in the margins. This margin(al) writing is sometimes
extensive, as when seven page footnote dominates the text and contains a key to the
entire text(14) or when a borderline text runs along the
bottom margin of a main text (JD, Par 119-218). Sometimes this margin(al) writing is
exclusive, as in The Truth in Painting, which Derrida notes is composed
entirely of writing "around painting" (9), or Glas, which can be seen
as a text of two margins, side by side (with additional writing inscribed in these
margins), or the recently published Jacques Derrida, in which Geoffrey
Bennington's account of the thinking of Derrida ("Derridabase") is accompanied
throughout by a co-text from Derrida ("Circumfession"). Margins are important for
Derrida because they are neither inside nor outside the system of meaning which they
enclose and thus indicate that the system does not have the self-control that it thinks
it has (MP xff; P 40). Margins are "loose ends" that provide deconstructive
discourse with a way of inhabiting the structures it seeks to demolish, whereby it can
use the logic of the system to unravel it and thereby subvert and overturn its logic.
This subversion, as in comedy, is accomplished by overcoming the paternal/patriarchal
obstacles put in its way (by 'castrating' them, i.e., showing their impotence). So
Derrida cuts into the texts of philosophy through imitation (of their desire for
presence) and, looking for presence, does not find it. He thereby cuts down the
"transcendental signified", Logos, God the Father (D 76-78) -- which seemingly
had stopped "play" -- and thereby accomplishes the play (irony) that was always already
there (e.g., in philosophy) by affirming it.

This affirmation is an affirmation of freedom and the future -- freedom from the
unrealizable and illusory desires and obsessions that bound the past, freedom for the
future and "an entirely different logic" (Ltd 157n) which is radically other,
unfettered, and undefinable (by current standards). So we find Derrida speaking
frequently in and of the future perfect, e.g., when he notes that the phrase il y a
là cendre "says what it will have been" (C 35), or when he mulls over the phrase
"He will have obligated" (il aura obligé; Ps 159ff), or when he disclaims any
intention to present a work by saying: "This therefore will not have been a book" (D 3).
Derrida, like comedy, gives priority to the future, the future that always
already will have been perfect(15) -- perfect
in that it is always already privy to the imperfection (the "dead time", "le passé
absolu"; OG 66, 68) of the present (and the past). Moreover, just as this movement
toward the future in significative comedy is a move toward greater inclusiveness and
integration, so it is with Derrida. The value of truth is not contested or destroyed,
but reinscribed within a wider context (Ltd 146). Past thinkers like Hegel and Plato are
not ignored and dismissed but read over and over (P 77; EO 87). The thing attacked in
the deconstructive 'attack' is not ruined but monumentalized (S 4; cf. Gl 1b); past
thinkers are erected (relevé), elated, raised up, put into relief and relifted
(relève) in the affirmative comic relief (relève) of deconstruction
that shows that there always already was play (irony), and nothing but play (irony). As
a result, speaking of ourselves and others "in a deconstructive vein is precisely to
unfold their absolute sociability, their constitutive entanglement in alterity and
difference."(16)

However, there is reason to doubt an ultimately significative reading of the texts of
Derrida, just as there is reason to doubt that comedy has any ultimately significative
function. The doubt arises from the double bind in which both comedy and Derrida are
caught. The double bind of comedy is that if one defines one's u-topian perspective, it
is no longer a u-topia: defined, it is placed within the oppositional order of
the dominant society, and is appropriated into that society. Comedians and comic
characters are aware of this and, since part of what animates them is a desire to be
free of any appropriation, their attitude tends to be that of Groucho Marx: they do not
want to belong to any club that would have them as members. As a result, the comic
immediately turns against the goal toward which he seemed to work. The comic is only
comfortable as the loyal opposition. This is hardly the basis for an ethical or
political program, which may be why Prince Hal had to abandon Falstaff and the Boar's
Head Inn in order to govern, and one reason why so much of comedy avoids making ethical
or political points altogether. Indeed, when you come right down to it, one may
forcefully argue that comedy does not lend itself to making ethical points; at best one
can say that comedy can influence conduct in one way or another, which is to say that it
could serve to deprave and corrupt just as easily as reform and elevate.(17)

Derrida, like a (good) comic, is also conscious of his double bind. All too aware of
the trap of becoming entangled in the order of metaphysics, he insists that he opposes
nothing to the oppositional logic of philosophy (Ltd 117; PSF 259f); any apocalyptic
tone he has taken in the past is "ironic," and does not try to lead or conduct (AT 30,
33ff). In addition, this irony is not the traditional sort of irony that masks some
secret knowledge or presence (as the "good" irony or play in Plato presumably does).
There is no secret knowledge (C 41, BL 205), no law behind the representation (BL
207ff); this is why Derrida works so hard sometimes to distance himself from negative
theology (Ps 535-595; cf. MP 27). The texts of Derrida supplement rather than supplant,
mimicking the desire of philosophy by continuing to desire, to play, endlessly. Put
another way, one always begins again, one is always beginning; "the whole does nothing
but begin" (Par 275; cf. Ps 649-650). So Derrida's 'hope' is not to erect another truth
in the place of metaphysics (which would only re-establish an opposition), but simply to
neutralize the system by laughing at it. But even that is not quite right, for the
subversions playing about the law that he shows us do not mock or transgress the law;
these games would not be possible, would have no force, without the instance of the law
they seem to defy. There is no reason for Derrida's "play" unless he draws reason from
the law, unless he provokes it. Hence he must produce the desire of philosophy in
twisting it; he must demonstrate the madness of philosophy rather than oppose it from
the outside with another madness (Par 246; cf. Par 285-286). As castration and
mimesis (P 84), transgression and affirmation (WD 274), the double reading
(writing/bind/science) of deconstruction might be either conservative or revolutionary,
depending upon how it is deployed (Ltd 141). Or, put another way, despite whatever
ethical/political stance it takes, Derrida's theory of deconstruction "leaves the world
as it is and was," though "our grasp of why it is and must be left as it is and was" has
changed.(18)

(5) Living On. This seems to completely deconstruct Baudelaire's distinction
between the significative and absolute comic, and return us to the singular purpose of
any and all comedy: to go on, to survive. As W.D. Horwath has put it (6),

comedy may be said to be 'moral' if it is based on a wholesome, positive attitude to
life. Though it does not normally set out to change men's attitudes, nevertheless its
effect is to reinforce our acceptance of a viable social order, a norm of behavior based
on an unwritten compact between the playwright and the audience. The misfits, the social
schemers, those who would upset the order of things are rendered harmless; if they are
not converted to a right way of thinking, at least they are excluded from the social
microcosm that the dramatist has created. The tricks and deceits, the moral turpitude of
the rogues and villains, become part of a larger scheme which flatters the spectator's
need for security and sends him home reassured.

In other words, comedy in its many forms is a celebration and affirmation of life, of
living on, of conserving oneself and/or society. The fertile imagination of the comic
ironist is put in the service of securing the comic and/or his view of the world. This
is the case from the simplest fairy tale, where everyone (all the "good"
people, anyway) lives (happily) ever after, to the grandeur and abstractness of
life everlasting in Dante's Divine Comedy (where both the good and bad live on
ever after, both happily and unhappily), from philosophy's escape into the magical
forest of the Academy and Plato's dialogues, where Socrates lives on to play the fool
who makes the wise seem foolish as he carries on endless discussions that espouse a
multiplicity of views (and hence no particular view) of no one in particular, to
Kierkegaard's "transcendental buffoonery" (Simon, 78ff) that parodies systematic
philosophy (and even his own work) from behind pseudononymous masks. Ethics is
incidental or irrelevant to the ultimate task of salvation, of being saved in order to
live on.

So too the Derridean u-topia seems to consist of a comedy of ever-shifting
perspectives that refuses to take a stand, or takes a stand "to be specified," because
it is self-conscious that every stand is always already contaminated by what it is not,
every point of view no view (point de vue; PSF 442, 459) with the goal of
making us more self-conscious of the games we play, including the fact that there is
nothing else but games. What lives on with Derrida? The text, including the text of
philosophy, lives on, like some inhuman hypertext on computer that goes on being written
from semester to semester in contemporary university writing classes.(19)
Or, more precisely, what lives on is the law and desire of texts, and of philosophies.
Indeed, Derrida wants it to live on, for if it were to reach its goal, its
telos (a conclusive thesis), the desire of philosophy, and its telos,
would disappear, become paralyzed, immobilized, die (Ltd 129; Par 119ff; PSF 285). Hence
deconstruction strives to keep the discussion going, living on, open (Ltd 111,116);
that is the ethics of this discussion, this u-topia. As a result, we can see
Derrida as the end of philosophy in the sense that philosophy attains its goal in
Derrida: to go on, to survive and continue in a world that is especially hostile to it.

Nevertheless, it is far from clear that we should rejoice in this prospect, for there
is much despair in comedy, a despair that comes from the recognition that the
repetitive, obsessive, foolish behavior depicted in the comedy will go on and on,
indefinitely. In Stanley Kubrick's black comedy "Dr. Strangelove," Joint Chief of Staff
"Buck" Turgidsen relishes the future life underground proposed by Dr. Strangelove
(complete with numerous women for every man!) to the point of worrying about a shelter
gap; the film then closes with shots of mushroom clouds accompanied by the song "We'll
Meet Again." In Woody Allen's "The Purple Rose of Cairo," the heroine (Cecilia), having
foresaken the ideal man come to life from the screen for the "real" actor (who played
the ideal man), only to be dumped by the actor, returns to her escape into the movies.
In both cases, nothing has been accomplished, nothing has been learned; both stories
begin again. Or, as Derrida says, we are always beginning; the arche-originary "yes"
with which we "begin" and "end" can only be a fiction, a fable, hearsay (Ps 647-648; UG
57ff). We are given over to affirming an endless recitation of ourselves that never
takes place (Par 243, 266ff).

Walter Kerr puts an escapist twist on this theme, suggesting not only that "within
comedy there is always despair," but also adding that it is "a despair of ever finding a
right ending except by artifice and magic."(20) Comedy
is an escape-aid; its celebration and affirmation of life requires a triumph of
fantasy and imagination over the realities of life (and death). One must rise above
(beyond) the 'real' world, without gravity -- one must detach oneself from the
way things are -- in order to accomplish one's desire. Comedy's triumph of life involves
a triumph over life. But detachment, distance, tends to make one insensitive. This is
certainly true of comedy, where we laugh at the faults, foibles and injuries of others.
Comedy is the original theater of cruelty, the comic the original assassin whose highest
aspiration is "to kill the audience." Horace Walpole's famous line -- "The world is a
comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel" -- rings true.

Since Derridean deconstruction works on the basis of, and directed toward, an
undecidable, undefinable, all-inclusive u-topia of endless re-presentation and
re-production, with a faith that, at bottom, it all comes to the same thing (a
will-to-presence, "wanting to say") and the superior, comprehensive view that "one
politics is always being played against another (Ltd 135), it is not surprising that the
detachment, violence and insensitivity of comedy shows itself in the texts of Derrida as
well. We can see it in the lack of feeling for Romeo and Juliet (Ps 519-533) or for the
country man denied access to the law (BL). We can see it in the priority given to
freedom, to the unfettered future rather than the limited past, for in giving the future
priority, Derrida would seem to exhibit the revenge that characterizes
metaphysics, the will's ill will toward time and its 'It was'. 'It was,' the
imperfect: that is "the fundamental trait of time in its authentic and entire
unfolding as time,"(21) whereas the future is "the
incognito of the eternal which is incommensurable with time" (Caputo, 15). To be is
to be in time and therefore imperfect or, shall we say, questionable and
questionworthy. Dissatisfied with such 'imperfection', such "questionable-worthiness" [frag-würdigkeit],
Derrida and comedy seek to suspend time and achieve the perfection of some
transcendental archilimbo ("neither inside nor outside") that exceeds the grasp of
history though it is only realized within the context of history (Ps 648). Everything is
contretemps (Ps 521). Or, as pointed out before, for Derrida "the whole does
nothing but begin", such that history is mastered in a total and present resumption (Par
275; IOG 103). Such a suspension of time is revenge against time -- and that is the
project of philosophy (metaphysics).

From its superior, u-topian perspective, comedy thrives on representation;
caricature, for instance, is a staple of comedy. Derrida shares this strategy with
comedy; Derrida in fact finds representation, as a posited image, to be the
necessary character of all presentations (Ps 120, 123). However, in this Derrida would
seem to repeat the slippage that takes place in Aristotle whereby all being is something
produced, reproduced, ultimately, in the modern era, by man himself.(22)
The world then becomes how I see it, how I produce it, how I want
to represent it, since there is no authority other than the representer (D
195). So Derrida (like comedy) claims to be free of destiny; all sendings are messages
without message or destination (see "Envois" [PSF 3-256]; cf. AT 34-35; Ps 391-392,
519ff). What, for example, is left of Hegel? Just quotations (Gl 1a), quotations which,
like aphorisms and names, can be quoted infinitely out of any context (Ltd 65; MP
316-317; Ps 520) -- which is exactly what Derrida does in a text like Glas
(196bi-198b; see his comments in AT 30) or the whole of Cinders. Everything is
thus at the deconstructionist's disposal (AF 118, 134). Derrida's will to
control is on display in several areas: his effort to control the 'undecidability' of
language by intending (like Joyce; see IOG 102) the ambiguity of various
signifiers in his texts, in his desire (like Plato and others) to choreograph a
multiplicity of voices (EO 183-184; see, e.g., Cinders), and, most recently, in
his refusal to allow his thought to be characterized without having a say (JD). This
even goes so far as to affirm an "active forgetfulness" (MP 136; WD 247, 265; cf. Ps
649-650) whereby one tries to control one's forgetfulness and oblivion, at least a
little -- by affirming it. The result of all of this would seem to show deconstruction
as manipulative and frivolous as philosophy, but self-consciously so, a willful
dissemination of fictions and constructs by which one is aware of being the fool.

Indeed, the self, characterized as a network of traces, a tele-phone exchange (UG
84), or (like Plato) a post-master (PSF 200, 207; Ps 271), is not attached to
others but to a multiplicity of disembodied voices and languages. As a result, for all
the apparent sociability of the comic-Derridean u-topia, an isolated, narcissistic
individualism seems to prevail here. This, not surprisingly, is in keeping with what
Frye notes as the final stage of comedy: the comic society collapses and disintegrates
such that "the social units of comedy become small and esoteric, or even
confined to a single individual," with "the love of the occult and the
marvelous, the sense of individual detachment from routine existence" becoming
more prominent (185; my emphases). Such a para-sitical individualism -- constantly
subjecting all others who profess even a provisionally unified meaning to continual
analysis and criticism that it always already will have been inadequate (whereby the
other does not speak to deconstruction) -- coupled with a self that is no self, unbound
by limits that would define it and give it responsibility, makes for the ultimate
u-topia. It constitutes an escape into a faith that grants that "kind of certainty
which is safe even in the uncertainty of itself, i.e., of what it believes in."(23)
With Derrida, that faith is an affirmation of the innocence of becoming that aspires to
the immortality of Dionysus (who survives, though torn to pieces, and who is the
technician of and spectator to tragedy [e.g., in Euripides' Bacchae])
rather than mortal participation in the play of the world, an affirmation of fantasy and
imagination over reality.(24) One puts on the mask of
Kierkegaard's knight of faith, or Zen Buddhism's laughing Buddha, safe and secure behind
an ironic smile.

To conclude. In conjuction with the comic, we have seen that the task of delimitation
as set forth in the texts of Derrida is u-topian in the radical sense of the
word, attempting to breach the very limit that it marks. Unravelling the texture of
philosophy and its obsession for a presence infinitely deferred, Derridean
deconstruction laughs at the old order, breaking the rules as it defines them, marking
the end of authority, of history, of the self. Freed from constraint, deconstruction
affirms the irony and play that is always already there, scattering meaning to the winds
in an infinitely repeatable dissemination of significance. But this, as Derrida shows
us, is what philosophy always already has been doing. Thus philosophy lives on in the
texts of Derrida, for better or for worse, in the hands of couriers from a king that was
never present, (doubly) bound by their oaths of service. On the one hand, there is the
apparent duty and desire to be significant, to matter, to be relevant, to be useful, to
impart a secret knowledge, even if that secret knowledge is only knowing that one does
not know, that no one knows. On the other hand, there is a desire for freedom, bound not
to be bound by the past, or even the desire for significance. One longs to retreat from
politics in the streets to the magic forest of the Academy, from the world to the
labyrinth of the (cogito's) imagination. Such is the double bind of comedy, of
Derrida, of philosophy.(25)

3. Geoffrey H. Hartman, Saving the Text:
Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), p.
24 and passim notes the constant "jesting" and "comedy" of Derrida's texts, and
Eve Tavor Bannet refers to the way in which Derrida "parodies traditional forms of
scientific discourse in the humanities" in Structuralism and the Logic of Dissent:
Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), p.
225, while Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1985), p. 267, makes reference to the wit and possible recovery of the
comic in Derrida. David Farrell Krell, Intimations of Mortality (University
Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986), p. 151, hints at the comic
character of Derrida's though by noting its playful (almost silly) nature, and John D.
Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp.
195, 291-293 notes the comic nature of Derrida's thinking as characteristic of one side
of postmodern thought. While Mark Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 15, 158-168, makes reference to the
"levity of comedy" that results from a deconstructive a/theology that exploits the
insights of Derrida, and Candace D. Lang, Irony/Humor. Critical Paradigms
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. 3-4, 55-58, and passim
refers to Derrida's "humorous" (i.e., postmodern ironical) critical strategies, Stephen
W. Melville hints at the laughter of deconstruction in the title of his book,
Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernity (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1986).

11. See "De l'essence du rire" in Oeuvres Complètes
(Paris: Pléiade, 1961), pp. 985-986; translated by Jonathan Mayne as "On the Essence of
Laughter," The Mirror of Art (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956), p. 143-144.
Edith Kern has made use of this distinction to explore the comic genre in her book
The Absolute Comic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).

14. In De l'esprit, nearly 8 pages (147-154) are
dominated by a footnote, a textual matter that is obscured in the English translation,
Of Spirit. What is even more remarkable is that the footnote in many ways ties
together much of what Derrida is trying to bring to light in the "main body" of the
text, and is therefore hardly "mariginal" in the sense of "unimportant."

15. See Andrew J. McKenna, "Postmodernism: It's Future Perfect"
in Postmodernism and Continental Philosophy, ed. Hugh J. Silverman and Donn
Welton (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 228-242. Cf. David
Farrell Krell's "The Perfect Future: A Note on Heidegger and Derrida" in
Deconstruction and Philosophy, ed. John Sallis (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1987), pp. 114-121.

17. A parallel between the comedian's attitude toward utopia and
philosophy's can be seen in Plato: Plato excluded himself from his dialogues, and
excluded all philosophers of his type (i.e., "poets") from the utopia he portrays in
The Republic. And, of course, the Platonic dialogues have been used in a variety of
ways politically.

Regarding the unclear formulation of the 'conclusion' of comedy, see Frye, p. 169.
Regarding the ethics of comedy, see Charney, p. 145, and Levin, p. 22.

18. Joseph Margolis, "Deconstruction; or The Mystery of the
Mystery of the Text" in Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, p. 149.

See DO 120 on how Derrida's political stances are detached from his intellectual
project of deconstruction. See also WD 274, Ltd 141, Christie MacDonald's comments in
questioning Derrida at EO 174, and Hartman, p. 24, regarding the conservative nature of
Derrida's deconstruction.

19. It is interesting in this regard to note the following
prefatory remark in JD: "The guiding idea of the exposition comes from computers: G.B.
would have liked to systematize J.D.'s thought to the point of turning it into an
interactive program which, in spite of its difficulty, would in principle be accessible
to any user."

22. For an account of this slippage, see Reiner Schürmann,
Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, trans. Christine-Marie
Gros (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 83, 86, 97-105, 255f.

24. See Merchant, pp. 79-82 ("The Metaphysics of Comedy") and
Clifford Leach, Tragedy (London: Methuen and Company, 1969), p. 77, regarding
the ultimate attitude of comedy. See also, Kern, pp. 13, 41-49, 114-15 and passim,
regarding the triumph of fantasy and imagination over reality that occurs in comedy. See
Hartman, p. 24, regarding the forced nature of Derrida's jesting, Schürmann, p. 321n.44,
regarding Derrida's apparent regret over the loss of the One, and the readiness of some
Christian theology to take up deconstruction (see, e.g., note 3), all of which suggest
these conclusions. Carl Raschke, "The Deconstruction of God" in Thomas J.J. Altizer, et.
al., Deconstruction and Theology, (New York: Crossroad, 1982), pp. 29-30,
suggests the link between deconstruction and the immortality of Dionysus.

25. An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the annual
meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in Boston, MA in
October, 1992. My thanks to Jim Walter at Sinclair Community College, who read a draft
of this paper and provided helpful suggestions. Some of the work for this paper was done
while attending an NEH Summer Seminar during 1991 at the University of
California-Riverside, "Postmodern Postures: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and Rorty." My
thanks go to the NEH and especially the seminar director, Bernd Magnus, for their
support.